Well! Thanks
Darkwind for remembering how interested I was in seeing this project happen.
But you know what I always say - The later you are getting to the party, the drunker the girls are! Wait, that has no relevance here..... Regardless, it's sound wisdom to help you in life!
Okay, before I do a brief outline of all of the ideas that I had knocking around in my head (many of which I touched on in the original thread), I just have to say,
R'lyeh is IN! The more of this thread I read, the more shocked I was at their lack of mention, until it finally happened and I cried out in pure joy.
They're Illithid Starspawns - the perennial space aliens of Dominions, excluding them would be a terrible travesty!
Beyond that, I see no reason we can't draw a lot of inspiration from popular fiction, so that the majority of the tough mental work can go towards making the mod WORK.
For example Predators (per the movies), Klingons (duh), Kilrathi (Wing Commander), Protoss/Eldar (you seriously believe Protoss weren't already ripped off from 40K?
), and the various and sundry races from games like MoO, Ascendancy, and Galactic Civ should give plenty of templates that can be made as similar or as generic as we want them to be. Also, it could be very cool to have 2 human factions, one based off of the "Evil Empire" of the Star Wars universe, while another is perhaps based off of the more Earth based human culture from Starship Troopers.
Okay, first I am going to skim through the thread again, and pick out people's ideas so I don't look like a vulture, even though many of these seem to be in posts by a guy named JimMorrison in the other thread.
-Ground + Space battles. Planets should be in clusters of 3-4 to make "castles" (Starports?) viable. Deep space represented by Water provinces. In lieu of "water shape" (which could be incredibly awesome) then transports would have Sailing, and "Capital Ships" would be Amphib.
-Ranged Weapons: Easy enough for energy weapons to either have no graphic, or for fun use Lightning animations, or we can dig around and find existing graphics work nicely for different weapons. From a basic sense, javelins for missiles, and sling stones for mass drivers. Getting deeper we have interesting things like ice bolts for a Liquid Nitrogen Cannon, or Astral Geyser graphic to portray an orbital bombardment (think Hammer of Dawn, from Gears of War).
-Touching on Ground Combat again - I don't think ranges should be increased too much, unless movement is also increased. Else it will render close combat irrelevant, and I do like the idea of jedis and zerg-esque beasties. However it begs the question - if capital ships take part in ground battles, how do we explain a jedi running up to one and hacking away? Starships should in general have very high base protection, so ground forces must be really massed to take them down. Likewise, we should be very careful about true AOE effects. Starships alone should be poor against ground troops - by making it work both ways, you maintain relevance of combined forces, and create a need for "ground assaults" to actually take place.
-Planetary Invasion: Another thought, is if we issue Water Shapes to all the ground forces, perhaps "systems" (clusters of 3-4 usable planets) should have a province around them all, that is some sort of "extra-solar space" to keep assault forces from dropping onto the planets from out of nowhere. Space is big, it makes a bit of sense to slow down the movement of forces, making military action very strategic and deliberate.
-Regarding Stats: Stats and Gems are the only things I can think of that can't be renamed. They will require a suspension of disbelief I suppose. Although if most weapons are "Strength of Wielder Not Added", then it makes little difference, other than for the special ground melee units, and also for calculating sieging values. Gems are trickier, we can call them whatever we want to, but I believe we're not getting new names in game - so we have to pretend that our pretend gems are something else.
-Touching on Badger's idea of races from the golden age of sci-fi: Have at it! While I suggested that we draw many off of what is easiest (the faster we develop races, the more we can include!), if something piques anyone's interest, they should run with it. I mean, if someone wanted to do every single species in Star Wars - have fun with that, I bet you could bang them out really fast.
-Expanding on Ground/Space combat - Starships would tend to have multiple weapons systems, and should have massive HP, and enormous firepower. In ground assaults, they can only clear 1 square at a time even at range, right? So they are balanced to be quick and dirty in ship vs ship combat, and to not be overpowering in ground combat. Most ground units should have AP weapons, and some elite units should get weapons that do 1AN damage - plasma streamers or something designed to cut through heavy armor and shoot down invading ships.
-Is there a way to make units that expend themselves on activating a certain weapon? It would be nice to be able to make some sort of WMDs, but mostly only if they are one shot use, ie you use 30 "fire gems" (wink wink) to make some sort of missile, you launch it, it blows stuff up, it's gone. I suppose that could be done with "ritual spells" still, sci-fi versions of Fires From Afar and whatnot.
-Remember, what the graphics on the map actually look like, doesn't have to have direct bearing on what is defined as a "province". Some races may even start on some enormous gas giant, or on multiple moons of that giant. The star in each system doesn't have to play any significant role - it certainly doesn't need its own province, in terms of game mechanics, it's a colorful ball of light on the map, nothing more.
-Species specific worlds - We can make the sites in certain species' homes radiate cold or heat. "Dominion" itself shouldn't play as large a part in this. In fact, if we could alter the relative bonus/malus of shifting your temp scale to make it unattractive, then we might avoid the possibility of someone making your planet cold, from 20 light years away, "on accident".
Also each planet in a world would have several factors explored as far as resources (resources!), habitability (pop), and prevailing conditions (temp altering sites).
-Dominion spread will be a definite issue of some kind. In large part, due to the ridiculous idea of spreading cold or heat "through the galaxy", but also with the encapsulation of territory, dominion spread could create significant imbalances in short order. My best idea would be to make everyone act like Mictlan, with no Preaching, and Temples not providing checks. It needs to be engineered in a way that keeps people from being dominion killed through random events - I'm looking for ideas on how to make this work. <3
-Summoned/Built ships - Forgot to mention how much I like this idea. I think perhaps "items" should have a less significant role in the game, and "summons" play an even greater role. It would be nice if most of the more interesting units are not built with generic "resources" (though there will always be the dichotomy of the average infantry lifespan of 9 seconds, with the acknowledged impossibility of holding a planet without infantry!). So the challenge is to produce a dynamic where you need cheap castle chaff, but you also need to develop your summons, and really push your gem income.
-Gem income! That brings to another point, it might be a good idea to do away with single path searching spells, since this is high-tech territory. Providing an easily researched analogue of Acashic Record would insure that everyone has the ability to "Deep Scan" their available worlds early on. After the initial casts, you'd know all territory that you capture would be scanned already as well. Alternatively, since designing massive numbers of sites might become tedious and obnoxious, they could be simplified a great deal, and all of them placed at lvl 0 so they appear automatically - on the assumption that these space-faring civilizations understand how to look for needed resources.
I'll think of more later. Can someone point me to a good sprite editor? I have 0 modding experience..... So while I think I can do a good job with logistics/mechanics, I will need to inspire myself, and I thought graphics would be a great way!
Then perhaps if someone with a little patience wants to set me to task making sites or something, I'm good with that.
Oh, does anyone want to volunteer to throw together a test map graphic? Would be small, can use cheapo copy/paste images of our own planets, and doesn't need a .map file, just the image that can be tinkered with from there.
Re: Dominions 3000 (tentative name)
). What I was thinking was that the stronger, more cost-efficient ships would only be able to be accessed through summoning (and the strongest of ships would be unable to enter land, meaning that a fleet of smaller ships would be necessary to guard the space-worthy landlubbers as they fly through space to take enemy planets). Thus, someone relying only on recruitable ships would likely be very weak compared to someone using summoned ships as well (or summoned ships only, for that matter).
Linear Mode
